Rudism,
Looking at their data analysis, the expectation effect simply cannot work.
That is because the timing of the stimulus is
random. There is no way for anyone or anything to know when the next stimulus is going to occur, absent psi.
Look specifically at these lines:
Quote:
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We now have the following three conditions: An excess of skin conductance responses in the prestimulus epoch prior to audio stimuli, no such excess over chance expectation in the preceding epochs and a randomized inter-stimulus interval of 40 to 80 seconds. Any expectation effect must appear as an increase in the dependent variable (i.e., rate of production of SCRs), which is a monotonically increasing function of the time since the last arousing stimulus. Such an effect, were it to occur, could not give rise to an increase in the SCR rate solely in the epoch prior to the next startle stimulus, a fortiori when the timing of that stimulus was randomly varied and unknown to the participant.
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The next couple of paragraphs seal the deal -- expectation effects simply cannot account for the experimental results in this paper.
However, I "expect" I will continue to hear positional materialists (mislabeled as "skeptics", however I never hear an ounce of skepticism from them about supposed materialist explanations of reported psi phenomena) harping on how the presentiment studies can be fully explained as a simple statistical artifact of expectation effects for years and decades to come.
Keep in mind that the authors themselves hypothesize that these results could be a result of DAT (essentially experimenter psi), and there have been failed replications of presentiment effects (although lots and lots of successes, too). I think the best argument for the positional materialists at this juncture is simply to argue for the conspiracy theory that the parapsychologists who are successful at this experiment are all frauds.